Mailclient with POP3 support?

[necrevistonnezr]

Is there any way to run a webmail client on Cloudron with POP3 support?

Scenario: Keep my current mail provider for receiving and sending e-mail. (Regularly) download (and delete) all my e-mail via POP3 to a self hosted webmail client on Cloudron that allows access to such downloaded e-mail via IMAP.

Goal: Increased privacy (my e-mail is not sitting on my providers server) and less cost (I have a paid provider).

Tested so far: Neither Rainloop, Roundcube or SoGo support POP3. Synology does something like that with its MailPlus Client (https://www.synology.com/en-global/dsm/feature/mailplus).

[fbartels]

the programs fetchmail and getmail could be used for such a scenario. A while ago I already made a post about using fetchmail, but since it did not get traction I have not spent time on it.

Come to think about it there could be a case made that fetchmail would need to be included in the base functionality. Fetchmail can either deliver via smtp (which would need a mailbox with the receiving address locally) or via a delivery command. For something to use the delivery command it likely needs to be within the mail app container. Just a thought have not verified it.

For the case of native inclusion I am not sure if there is something in the node ecosystem than can be used more directly.

[murgero]

@necrevistonnezr said in Mailclient with POP3 support?:

Tested so far: Neither Rainloop, Roundcube or SoGo support

Login as admin to your nextcloud app -> add new app -> Communication -> Mail (Official NC app!) and see if that supports POP3? I know it support mutli-account but never tried POP3 before.

Edit: Sorry it does not support POP3.

[girish]

Indeed, there is no POP3 support. Most of the web mailers don't support POP3 support and at this point it's a bit out of scope for us to implement POP3 support in apps.

[necrevistonnezr]

@murgero No, it doesn't. Mailpile is one of the few web mail clients that does.

@girish I think it's worth reconsidering to support POP3 as it's the only save way to continue using your old mail provider without having all your old email sitting there... (or am I wrong?)

[fbartels]

I think you are looking at this from the wrong direction. Yes, in the past it was kind of a given that when you install a mail client on your desktop, that it needs to be able to fetch mails from external servers via pop3 and then later on sync with an imap server.

When you use something like Roundcube I would not call this a "mail client", it's a "webmail frontend". Meaning its supposed to connect to a single mail server. Display a single mailbox (in most cases). In these cases (you as the user) have no influence on the server to connect to in the backend and how outgoing mail should be sent. These are decisions that the admin has made for the user.

The way around this would be a mail fetching service running on the server (which is something that has been around for quite a while already) like fetchmail or getmail. But these also do have the downside that to connect to the external servers they need to store credentials and therefore weaken security (would be the same if the webmail frontend is doing it for you, with the additional downside that it then probably only would work when you have it open).

[murgero]

@necrevistonnezr said in Mailclient with POP3 support?:

@murgero No, it doesn't. Mailpile is one of the few web mail clients that does.

Right... Don't know if you saw the edit i made literal minutes after posting....?

[murgero]

@fbartels said in Mailclient with POP3 support?:

When you use something like Roundcube I would not call this a "mail client", it's a "webmail frontend".

This is called a mail client lol

[necrevistonnezr]

@murgero said in Mailclient with POP3 support?:

@necrevistonnezr said in Mailclient with POP3 support?:

@murgero No, it doesn't. Mailpile is one of the few web mail clients that does.

Right... Don't know if you saw the edit i made literal minutes after posting....?

Yes, sorry!

Would it at least be possible to import my existing mails into Roundcube or Rainloop (e.g. via Thunderbird) and configure the mail client to sent e-mails under my current mail address from my current mail provider (using the smtp of my current mail provider)?

[girish]

It's possible to import using a tool like imapsync - https://imapsync.lamiral.info/dist/ . This does require some time and effort to understand the tool and how to import but you can search for some online tutorials. I have used it before to import my own mails from gmail to Cloudron about 2 years ago.

As a heads up, if you have lots of emails in gmail, it can take up to a day to import since the gmail imap download access is rate limited!

[thetomester13]

@necrevistonnezr I actually wrote a post about migrating email hosts using the imapsync tool that girish recommended, you can check it out here. Note that my post is a bit more extensive as I also migrated registrars and had other active emails there that weren't mine, so yours should hopefully be a bit easier than the whole tutorial!

[necrevistonnezr]

Could we re-visit the idea to include fetchmail / pop3 support in the mail stack?
It would allow users to move to a self-hosted Cloudron but keep current mail addresses alive as a „shell“ without leaving mails on the old provider‘s server for analysis / AI training (looking at you, Google, for example)….

[girish]

Is there any webmail client that support pop3? I think fetchmail is a desktop app (Afaict)

[necrevistonnezr]

Sorry, I did not mean a webmail client but built-in fetching of mails and sorting such mail into the cloudron mailboxes.
(BTW: https://www.fetchmail.info/ is not a desktop app?)

[girish]

I misunderstood! Got it, we have to implement some sort of POP fetcher service to work with external mail boxes.

[necrevistonnezr]

@girish Yes, that's what I meant - that would be awesome!